Judaism has fascinated me from the first year I lived in New York City in 1975. I saw how Jews and Jewish structures so strongly influenced American culture if one knew what to look for. There were synagogues and the names of famous stores as well as Jewish listings in the city phone books. This is not surprising when one considers that Christians see their religion as the continuation of Jewish revelation but New York City is unique. The metropolitan area has the largest population of Jews outside the State of Israel. Walking in some city neighborhoods, one can almost believe he is in Israel.
Getting first-hand education in American history I soon learned how Jewish thinkers and entrepreneurs had contributed to the country's growth and evolution, surprising even more when one considers how Jews are such a small percentage of the total population. One may ascribe the influence to how commercial and cultural innovations often begin in cities and Jews are largely city dwellers. Then again, when one looks at Western culture in general, Jewish influence is proportionately huge as well, certainly larger than one might expect from the fraction of the total population in the West comprised of Jews. The names of innovators and thinkers in the West read like a roll call of Jewish names. One wonders at the link between the Jewish fundamental belief they are God's Chosen People and this dominance in science, commerce, ethics, philosophy, and many other areas of human achievement.
I grew up a Christian. As offshoot of the education I received in both undergraduate and graduate schools which were ran by Roman Catholic orders, I had eight years of Catholic theology. Religious practice and belief were central to my life as a child and later a youth. My family belonged to an indigenous church that was born at the same time the Filipinos were organizing their political revolution against Spain. The church had lost both attraction and members after the revolution was cut short by the arrival of American colonizers. Most people went back to the Roman Catholic fold, but not my mother's family. My grandmother was a pillar of the town Aglipay church. We went with our mother to the tiny, wooden church next to the imposing Catholic church fronting the town plaza. To attend and do well at Catholic universities I learned fast so I could defend my family's religious position. Before having to contend with Augustinian friars and Theresian sisters trying to convert me, the highlights I remember of my childhood revolved around our participation in the life of our small church. Religion has therefore been one of my major interests from the beginning.
Theology classes at San Agustin and, later, at Santo Tomás focused on Catholic dogma and the Gospels. I don't recall being encouraged to read the Bible for ourselves. The Catholic church, in contrast to Protestant churches, as a whole did not encourage communicants to consult the book directly. Lay people relied on priests and the religious orders (all religious schools were ran by religious orders) to interpret the church's teachings. Theology classes did include pertinent quotations from the Bible. I imagine selections from the Bible may have been suggested as well but I didn't see the teachers or any student bring a Bible to class. My family didn't own a Bible. I didn't acquire a Bible until I came to the U.S.
With access to books I began to read and collect literature on both the New Testament and the Old. Before long I wanted to read the Bible as accepted by Jews and acquired a bilingual copy of the Torah. The word "Bible" is said to derive from the Greek phrase Ta biblia, "the books." The phrase was used by Hellenistic Jews to refer to their sacred writings before the time of Jesus. Even after I admitted to myself that I could no longer consider myself Christian, my interest in biblical (to refer to both the Torah and the Christian Bible) continued to grow, especially as I became acquainted with the sacred writings (usually called scriptures, too) in other religious traditions. Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism and even religious movements that have long disappeared like gnostic sects had their collections of sacred writings.
Cultures and civilization in general fascinate me. Religions probably provide the core of most cultures. People through the ages have sought what their minds told them must exist, some power beyond their everyday existence and beyond what their physical senses perceived. In the West, Christianity is perhaps the main shaper of its culture. Arts, even sciences before the Age of Enlightenment, were sponsored by the Catholic church. But playing counterpoint to Christianity in the West was Judaism and to a lesser extent Islam (especially in the Iberian Peninsula and where the Ottoman Empire encroached on Eastern Europe, the remnants of the Byzantine Empire the Arabs took over since 1453). To understand Western culture one must know Judaism and the Jews.
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